Linkbait 13

More details on the BlackBerry PlayBook’s Android support. It’s not there out of the box, it won’t access the Android Market, and there may be performance issues with Android apps. Game developers, especially, are advised to use the PlayBook’s native QNX platform, which requires C++.

And Horace Dediu translates RIM CEO’s Balsillie’s remarks to normal language. In the long run Android will not be terribly important to the PlayBook; it’s more to capture hearts and minds in the short run.

Good point here: Google’s purpose with Android and Chrome is not making a profit, but protecting its position as the world’s prime search and advertising platform. Chrome and Android prevent others from taking too much browser or OS market share, and that matters because other parties may choose a different default search engine than Google.

Dennis Bournique discusses the newest Nokia WebKit — an upgrade from the one found on the N8. Apparently it runs on the C7. It’s a huge step forward from the old one, although the question remains how long the Symbian default browser will remain relevant. It’ll survive this year, but may not have a much longer lifespan than that.

Speaking of the iPhone 5, it will not be announced at WWDC, breaking a four-year tradition.
Why not? I hope it has something to do with the iPhone Nano and switching product life cycles. Pure guesswork, of course. I don’t know that Apple will release a Nano, but it makes so much sense and is the only way of gaining significant market share. And I don’t know why sales cycles would have to change because of the Nano (if it exists), but I hope some frightfully clever Apple watcher will eventually explain it.

Nokia will make tablets, but not with Windows, apparently. Will probably do MeeGo instead.

Josh Clark calls for a truce between web apps and native apps. A balanced strategy needs both. Interesting point, and now that web apps are becoming accepted as an alternative to native apps, he may be right. But we needed a period of strife first. If we’d said this a year ago, native would still trump web.

Mike Rowehl studies NFC and is not convinced it will amount to much. It could be great, but right now it’s only associated with payments, so most likely device vendors will only implememt the payment bits.
Personally I feel that even for payments it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be: all NFC-based use cases I’ve read so far require the user to have a credit card in order to charge the mobile wallet. And that should not be necessary.

Microsoft will start to push IE9 out to 7 and Vista users in June. Good. Pity about XP, though.